Vincent Tourle is back with Burslem after five years in which he has honed his skills in project management and estimating. His return marks a major push by the Tunbridge Wells company into the commercial sector of large-scale interior fit-outs.

Burslem is evolving. For about 150 years the business was in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, next to the cemetery, making it ideally placed to pick up commissions for memorials. But the site had no room to accommodate Managing Director David Hall’s plans for expansion, so it had to move.
“I had been looking for years for a new place to move to,” says David. “Our premises were just too small.”
The company has only moved two miles outside Tunbridge Wells, but the purpose-built 500m² workshop and showroom that David designed on Burslem’s new one-acre site is giving the company the opportunity to achieve the growth in production and sales that David is looking for.
In preparation for the move he had bought a Bavelloni Egar 315-4 CNC workcentre to work in conjunction with his Skema saw from Denver and an edge polisher to expand the worksurface sector of his business.
The move might only have taken him two miles from his previous premises, but it made a world of difference to Burslem – even taking the company out of Kent for the first time in its history and into East Sussex.
The showroom at the new location has been devoted to interiors, with Sophie Wright dealing with the kitchen side of the business. An adjoining showroom dedicated to memorials, which continue to contribute 30% to the company’s turnover, is managed by Howard Whitelaw.
And while most memorial masons want to be near a cemetery, David Hall says the move away from the cemetery in Tunbridge Wells has not made much difference to Burslem’s memorial sales because most of them come via funeral directors, who still direct the bereaved towards Burslem.
As well as domestic interiors and memorials, David has been expanding the commercial interiors side of business and had reached a point where he needed another pair of hands to take the business on to its next stage of evolution. The extra pair of hands he has recruited are Vincent Tourle’s.
Vince left Burslem in 2007 to help Chichester masonry company CWO set up a new office in Goudhurst, Kent. He was then recruited to the major London stone company Szerelmey as senior estimator. Now he is back with Burslem as Director of Operations with sole responsibility for the day-to-day logistics of the company’s production and site-based installation work.
The experience he gained of estimating and contracts management is of considerable benefit to Burslem and Vince says he likes the variety of work that Burslem, with its 17 employees, offers.
David Hall says: “Vince comes back to us with a wealth of experience that is entirely relevant to the sectors Burslem is expanding into. I have always been interested in attracting more commercial work. That’s not to say we’re not still interested in the kitchen market – we are – but we are continuing to evolve and Vince wanting to come back here has tied in very well with me wanting to push into other areas.”
Not that major fit-outs are a completely new area for Burslem. The move into the larger factory was always intended to make it possible to pick up that kind of work, especially in London. And it has. Burslem fitted out one of the blocks at More London. The company worked on HSBC’s head office in St James’s Street. It takes credit for some of the stone in 30 St Mary Axe (formerly the Swiss Re Building, otherwise known as Norman Foster’s Gherkin). Burslem also provided some of the prestigious interiors for apartments at Chester Square and Eaton Square.
“Over the years we have done quite a bit of prestigious fit-out work,” says David, “and the more you do the better you are known for doing it. You build up your CV as a company.”
And with the company’s reputation on the line, some of the work has involved going the extra mile.
One project used Greek marble that Burslem sourced directly from Greece, but when it arrived the polished face of the marble was scratched from where it had put through an edge polisher.
David: “As this purchase coincided with the onset of Greek social unrest there was little recourse to the supplier. Peter Sokolsky, the Foreman, and his team had many a 5.30am start to re-polish each slab on the jenny. We finished the fit-out at 9.15 on the handover morning.”
Burslem’s fixing teams regularly leave at 5.30am when they are working in London and when they were working at Exxon Mobil’s offices in Leatherhead last year they had to start at 7 in the evening and finish at 4 in the morning.
Burslem believe the squeeze on margins and the weakness of sterling is making it harder to obtain first class stone for projects from wholesalers in the UK, which, in turn, is making it harder to keep customers satisfied. But, says David, if there are problems it is how you deal with them that customers remember and “we don’t have a lot of dissatisfied customers”.
The recession hit Burslem as much as everyone else but the company’s consolidation into its new factory in 2008, closing its 100-year-old branch in Hastings as well as leaving Tunbridge Wells, helped contain costs. The following year was difficult but would have been worse without that consolidation.
David says the result of the changes has been that Burslem has a strong team working under one roof for a company with minimal debt. And he is looking forward to the year ahead. “We’ve had a good start and we now have the infrastructure and personnel to push on.”